A Toast to the Plans We Made to Live Like Kings...

What can i compare you to?

A mother in whose arms I feel, "the world is my oyster"
...Countless opportunities and real impact for those who dared take the first step

A happy childhood full of hopes and dreams
...I pledged to Nigeria my country to be faithful, loyal & honest

A burnt house with ashes left behind to remember what once was
...Poverty-stricken masses who numb the sickenly rich into further greed

A fallen king whose castle was once alight with laughter and dancing
...An oppressed populace who has forgotten its founding values

A false start at the sound of the gun
...Is this what democracy brings?

49...Glory lost, history forgotten, future hangs in the balance.

Who will rewrite the sixth decade?

Take it from me...

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HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY! Thanks to the Weepies for the title quote and a joint thank you to them and Shakespeare for the "what can i compare thee to" muse.

Festival of Death...

Came across this on Omoigui.com:

Just before 8:30 a.m. on February 13, 1976, the following curious announcement was heard on Radio Nigeria:

"Good morning fellow Nigerians, This is Lt. Col. B. Dimka of the Nigerian Army calling. I bring you good tidings. Murtala Muhammed's deficiency has been detected. His government is now overthrown by the young revolutionaries. All the 19 military governors have no powers over the states they now govern. The states affairs will be run by military brigade commanders until further notice.
All commissioners are sacked, except for the armed forces and police commissioners who will be redeployed. All senior military officers should remain calm in their respective spots. No divisional commanders will issue orders or instructions until further notice. Any attempt to foil these plans from any quarters will be met with death. You are warned, it is all over the 19 states.
Any acts of looting or raids will be death. Everyone should be calm. Please stay by your radio for further announcements. All borders, air and sea ports are closed until further notice. Curfew is imposed from 6am to 6pm. Thank you. We are all together."

Just prior to this broadcast, then Head of State, General Murtala Ramat Muhammed, along with his ADC (Lt. Akinsehinwa), Orderly and driver, had been assassinated on his way to work in a thin skinned black Mercedes Benz car without escorts. The unprotected car had slowed down at the junction in front of the Federal Secretariat in Ikoyi, Lagos, when a hit team which allegedly included Lt. William Seri and others, casually strolled up and riddled it with bullets.

Following confirmation of Muhammed's death, Lt. Col. Buka Suka Dimka, of the Army Physical Training Corps, who (along with some others) had been up for most of the night drinking champagne, then made a quick trip to the British High Commission at about 8 am where he demanded to be put in touch with General Gowon in Britain.

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TIME/CNN snapshot of the March 1976 executions of the coup plotters involved in the assassination of Murtala Mohammed.

Usually, Bar Beach on Nigeria's Victoria Island is dotted with sun umbrellas and gaily painted food stalls. Last week it became the scene of a kind of festival of death. Thousands of Nigerians, chanting "Traitors, traitors," jammed the beach, trampling the candy-striped awnings underfoot. A similar throng gathered not far away at Kirikiri Prison, just outside Lagos, the capital. Both high-spirited crowds were assembled to witness the public executions of some 30 soldiers, including four lieutenant colonels and six majors, and a lone civilian. A special military board had convicted them of planning the abortive coup of Feb. 13, in which Head of State Murtala Mohammed was assassinated (TIME, March 1).

"The condemned men are all in mufti," a Lagos radio correspondent announced crisply, giving a running account of the executions on Bar Beach. "Most of them look sober. Some manage to smile at newsmen." Religious confessions, Christian and Moslem, were received by two priests and a mallam (a Moslem religious leader). While the throng looked on, the 15-man firing squad opened up. The shooting lasted ten minutes, as one by one the coup plotters slumped to the blood-soaked sand.

With the executions, Lieut. General Olusegun Obasanjo, who took over the government of Black Africa's largest and richest country after the killing of Murtala, made good on his promise to dole out military justice to those found guilty. Surprisingly, one of the executed officers was former Defense Minister I.D. Bisalla, who had helped bring Murtala to power in an earlier, successful coup last July. Bisalla and many of the others were apparently implicated in the plot by Lieut. Colonel B.S. Dimka, the man who led the Feb. 13 overthrow attempt. Dimka managed to stay at large for three weeks, despite a nationwide manhunt, but he was captured at a roadblock in eastern Nigeria earlier this month.

During the investigation of the coup attempt, 125 people were arrested; 40 have been released. Aside from those already executed, several dozen others are still being interrogated, including Dimka himself. According to the Nigerian government, Dimka has also implicated Yakubu Gowon, the former head of state who was exiled after the coup that brought Murtala to power last July. Gowon, according to the government's charge, instructed Dimka to get together with Defense Minister Bisalla and attempt to overthrow the government. Their reasons for acting, said Nigeria's new defense chief, Brigadier Musa Yarduah, was the government's plan to cut the size of the army by almost half, a move that would transfer the 100,000 soldiers affected to other jobs, but which might leave a number of them out of work.

In England, where he is a political science student at Warwick University, Gowon denied any involvement in the coup attempt. Nonetheless the Nigerian government, which, after all, overthrew Gowon in the first place, seems bent on punishing him. Lagos radio said last week that "legal and diplomatic steps" are being taken to extradite Gowon to Nigeria, though it seems highly unlikely that the British government will accede to the request.

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Nigeria's hate-hate affair with military rule (1966-1999) saw the loss of many great lives, and not much by way of economic development and improved standards of living for the populace. As many things as are wrong with this country, let's be thankful that we have closed the door (and thrown away the key?) on those dark days and now live in a time where we have freedom of speech and can at least demand accountability from our leaders.

The Black Rock

Monday, Dec. 05, 1960 - Time Magazine Cover Story

At five minutes before nine the warning bell clanged, and the chattering parliamentarians in the lobby began to file into the House to take their seats. Precisely on the hour, a voice raised the traditional cry "Mistah Speakah," and the legislators froze as a bemedaled attendant solemnly descended the nine red-carpeted steps into the well of the House and laid a golden mace on the table separating the government front benches from those of the opposition. After a prayer calling down God's protection on the nation and Queen Elizabeth II, the Speaker, in his English-accented English, called "Odah, odah," and the debate began. Scarcely had it got into full swing when a proud, ascetic figure strolled slowly toward the government bench and all eyes converged on the ebony face of Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, O.B.E., K.B.E., C.B.E., LL.D., Prime Minister of Nigeria.


Along with its echoes of Britain's Westminster, the legislature over which Sir Abubakar presided last week had some of the flavor of a Pan-African Congress. On its benches tall, haughty Hausas, splendidly robed in green and scarlet, sat amongst volatile Ibos draped in white and azure gowns. Across the aisle were Yoruba tribesmen wrapped in gold, yellow and orange with little porkpie beanies on their heads. Between them, they constituted one of the world's noisiest


Parliaments. Each speaker was greeted with cries of "Heah, heah" from his friends and derisory shouts of "Sit down, you wretched fool" from his foes; from the rostrum came the perennial plea for "Odah, odah!" But somehow, through the din, the nation's problems got discussed and decided.


In the hurly-burly of 1960's African avalanche of freedom, Nigeria's impressive demonstration of democracy's workability in Africa is too often overlooked. Next-to-newest of the 18 nations to win independence this year, Nigeria entered the world community without noisy birthpangs or ominous warnings of its determination to avenge ancient wrongs. Since moderation and common sense are not the stuff that headlines are made of, the world's eyes


slid past Nigeria to focus worriedly on the imperialistic elbowings of Ghana's Nkrumah, on the heedless plunge into Marxism taken by Guinea's Sékou Touré and above all, on the bloody chaos in the Congo.


In the long run, the most important and enduring face of Africa might well prove to be that presented by Nigeria. Where so many of its neighbors have shaken off colonialism only to sink into strongman rule. Nigeria not only preaches but practices the dignity of the individual. And where such other islands of order in Africa as Liberia. Togo and the former French Congo lack the size and power to overbalance thrusting Ghana and Guinea (combined population:


8,665,000), the Federation of Nigeria stands a giant among Lilliputians; last October, when Nigeria's 40 million people got their independence, the free population of Black Africa jumped 50%. Backed by such numbers, Nigeria's sober voice urging the steady, cautious way to prosperity and national greatness seems destined to exert ever-rising influence in emergent Africa.


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The article goes on to discuss the backgrounds of some of the key players at the time – Tafawa Balewa, Nnamdi Azikiwe etc. The rest of it can be found here. It is worth reading in full as it provides brilliant insight into the context of our independence and the attitudes and aspirations of the ‘60s.

Do we still have the potential to get to "prosperity and national greatness"? Or is it much too late now? What do we think?

1951

Nothing spectacular, as far as I know, happened in 1951. Margaret Jeffries, a British woman, lived in Nigeria for a year, wrote in her diary and took pictures of some of the things she saw. Her (sometimes genuinely amusing and other times not so amusing) observations shed light on the relationship between coloniser/colonised, the political oppression and aspiration, the racism, the British superiority complex, the Nigerian inferiority complex, the Black man's desire to please, and a host of other things.

Excerpts from her diary
(With random photographs interspersed...)

Large king lizards live in garden and on balcony... When they are angry their colours get brighter... Each has his own territory and chases away intruders. Sometimes they fight, knocking each other with their tails. Some people in Abeokuta had a tame lizard which would come when they called Freddy. But one day Freddy had a fight and got killed and the victorious lizard who usurped his territory is quite untameable.
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The men say the barman, Thompson, comes from a cannibal district and they wouldn't like to meet him in the Bush when he was hungry. Cannibalism is still practiced in remote districts.
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I also bought a man's embroidered cap. This was a cheap one... It is made of an old sugar bag embroidered in shiny green and orange rayon. Others... bore the words “Tate and Lyle” or “Fine Sugar” revealing their origin. This adds to their value and they fetch a higher price than unstamped ones... It is not only the proletariat who like an English trademark. We met a village headman, whose white robe was draped to display a large blue stamp “20 yards. Made in England”. He probably thought this added more distinction than the beautiful hand embroidery at neck and hem.
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Today I achieved a life-long ambition – to go to shop with a little black boy trotting behind to carry my purchases, a la elegant lady of Queen Anne's time.
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Lagos cinemas are all open to the sky. In the two-and-sixes you sit up on a balcony on wicker chairs, with an awning overhead. The groundlings in the ninepennies sit on hard forms and have no shelter from the rain. Their reactions were the same as their white counterparts in England. They warned the hero of impending peril and applauded when right triumphed over wrong.
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We drove out to Paiye where the District Chief, Dauda Paiye, a tall fine-looking man, received us ceremoniously. Where a European politely removes his hat, an African removes his shoes. We noticed Paiye was wearing embroidered heelless slippers. His servant removed these and he squatted down in front of us and touched the ground with his knuckles. After a few polite remarks had been exchanged he rose up, his servant put on his shoes, and he and his retinue conducted us to see the pond.
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The Malete policeman came and looked at my watch, set his own by it and then went to check the watches of his colleague of Elemere and the two chiefs. Having set the official time for two villages, I only hope my watch was right, but it wouldn't matter very much if it wasn't. Time is not of much account here. The opening lines of Walter de la Mare's new poem “Winged Chariot” might almost be an African's question to a European:- “Why this absurd concern with clocks my friend?"
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As well as the large pan of rice on her head nearly every woman coming to the mill carried a piccin strapped on her back. These little black babies with their woolly topknots are lovely, though to European eyes their beauty is marred by the barbarous habit of slashing their faces soon after birth in patterns according to the markings of their tribe. The little girl piccins, however tiny, wear jewellery, invariably ear rings, often necklaces and bracelets... On the arm of one small mite I noticed a man's wristwatch on a wide chromium strap. It was not only going, but told the correct time. Unlike their bigger brothers and sisters the babies seemed scared of us. I suppose it is quite natural for a white person to look like a bogey, to a black baby.
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I asked what it was and it turned out to be a song in praise of ZIK, Dr Azikiwi, the political leader, head of NCNC (National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons). He is an Ibo, like “the boys”, and a fierce nationalist. He wants a united Nigeria, combining all tribes, and is anti-European. The main opposition to his party comes from the ACTION GROUP of strong Yoruba influence, which is less anti-British and seems to advocate regional autonomy for Hausas, Yorubas, Ibos, and other main tribes.
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I can't help thinking that it is better for themselves and for Africa, if all people with a strong unshakeable colour prejudice were to keep out. Gratuitous rudeness on the part of white people, gives the rabid nationalist a legitimate grievance and may make otherwise reasonable types into rabid nationalists themselves, thus driving yet another nail into the coffin of the poor old British Empire.
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This was a great [football match] attended by the Governor's Deputy – the G being on leave – and the local Oba, in state. Immediately behind us sat the famous ZIK with wife, a girl friend, to whom he explained at length the finer points of the game all through the match. It was an exciting game. When the whistle went for time the score was even, 2 all. There was a twenty minute extension during which Railway scored the winning goal. Their victory was a well-deserved triumph of brains over brawn. The Plateau team were taller and heavier and looked quite a different type, possibly Pagans. Their supporters among whom we found ourselves, looked a real tough crowd, including mining types. The audience was orderly and good-humoured, though policemen with truncheons were there in force.
Do we think she was someone "important"?


The Photographs in order:
1 - 22 Cameron Road, Ikoyi
2 - Broad Street
3 - Marina
4 - The Creek from Obalende Bridge
5 - Victoria Beach
6 - Margaret Jeffries